by Elsa Jade
“I don’t know anything about falling in love,” she warned him, keeping her voice severe despite the quiver in her bones. “But we can fall into bed and see where that takes us.”
“On this ship, not far.” In the deep shadows, his heavy-lidded green eyes were almost black as he snugged her body up against his chest. “Guess you’ll have to stay close.”
She still had on the high-necked cloak over her split skirt outfit that she’d worn to guard against the moon’s chill and her attraction to the dangerously captivating Theta. But she might as well have been stripped down to the frail linens of her saloon days for all the good those layers of protection were doing now. Braced on his bare chest, her hands almost burned, and the lustful heat simmered through her blood, as ephemeral as cosmic dust.
And as eternal and ever-expanding.
Oh yes, she wanted him to feel this too, if only to release some of its power from her veins. If she didn’t, she might overheat, like the shuttle.
Slipping her hands higher, she tangled her fingers in the long locks of his hair and pulled him down to her kiss.
They fumbled for a moment, as she tried to open to him and he tried to slant his mouth hard across hers. They ended up mashing together in an awkward tangle of tongues and squish of lips as if neither of them had done this before.
He jerked his head back, smacking his skull on the bulkhead behind him. And he laughed.
“Hey, shouldn’t you take this more seriously?” She peered up at him, not sure how affronted she should be. “True love is at stake.”
“How many men have you kissed?” He reached up to cup her jaw, feathering the edge of his thumb over her cheek. “At least as many seduction protocols as I have just in my initial coding, I should think. And yet we blunder.”
She tilted her head away from his touch, knowing he’d feel the scars still pitting her skin. “There’s a lot of pressure.”
“I feel it.” He dropped his hand to her backside and anchored her hips to his.
Yes, she felt that too. She’d read that though most shroud blanks were cloned from the heavier, more muscular sexes for battle purposes, the genetic and mechanical modifications applied during their building and training left them indifferently endowed in their reproductive apparatus. But from the respectably (or perhaps disreputably) insistent bulge against her belly, her Theta had escaped that fate.
She took one long step back from him.
He straightened immediately. “Nell…” But when her hands went to the closure of her cloak, he paused, his gulp obvious.
With quick flicks of her fingers, she loosened every fastening on her clothes, revealing hints of skin as she went, top to bottom and back again. She’d never stripped for a cowboy before—none had ever cared about seeing any part of her other than the business bits, and she hadn’t cared to show them more. But Troy’s greedy stare and ragged breath seemed to give back more than she was taking off. With each whisper of air over her exposed flesh, his breathing frayed more, but he stayed flat against the bulkhead as if pinned there, only his eyes moving as he devoured her from a distance.
What did he see with that silver-green stare? How different was it from what she saw with her broken and changed eyes?
With a shrug, she let the loosened layers fall away from her shoulders. The heavy fabric accordioned down around her ankles, and when she took a step back out of her boots, Troy peeled himself off the wall to follow as if an invisible length of string stretched between them.
Maybe it did—a link as strong and invisible as microscopic robots. Echoing her gesture, he unfastened the closures on the robe and shed the plasilk next to hers. She’d already seen his half-bared strength, felt the lean power of him, not to mention his weight when she’d shot him and dragged him to her ship. But seeing him unveiled all at once made her body clench with yearning.
Montana of her time had been breathtakingly, beautifully raw, and the empress’s royal retinue was elegant and perilous at the same time. Troy was all of that in one wickedly tempting package. He’d been designed and built as a flawless weapon, of course, but with the silver aura around him shimmering, he was a work of art too. One she could touch.
Still, they stood unmoving, both of them naked on a spaceship marooned on an empty moon far from everything either of them had ever known.
Well, not everything. Both of them knew where this was going—to bed. He had the programming and she had the experience, and yet they hesitated.
It was one thing to fuck for survival or even simple pleasure. But if they did this, they were admitting to trusting each other, sharing not just their nanites but a purpose. Could they do that? Neither of them had that sort of knowledge or practice.
But the universe kept spinning and they were two bodies in motion. When they crashed together again, she couldn’t remember the exact steps. All she felt was the glide of his hands on her body and the heat of his gusting breath across her parted lips as he swooped down for another deep, languid kiss.
This time, the awkwardness was gone, burned off in the friction of skin on skin and the whisper of her name on his lips. Like the shuttle’s protective shield torn away by the enticing pull of the moon. He traced the upper arc of her teeth with his tongue, and when she sucked his lower lip between hers, biting down lightly, he bucked his hips into hers.
Troy wasn’t one of the bull-hung boys swaggering into the saloon who’d left her too often bruised, although the swell of his erection was very definitely a hot brand against her thigh. But for once, she didn’t feel like a heifer roped and thrown, simultaneously indignant and resigned. Somehow he found the tender spots that made her weak and the touches that made her want to shatter the moon with screams of pleasure.
Oh, it wasn’t somehow, she knew—he was programmed for desire and sin. But to have such attention focused on her, only her, was a delight she’d never known.
He cupped his hands around her backside, fingers sinking into her flesh, and boosted her up. Willingly, she wrapped her legs around his waist to align their hips. She’d had harder bangs than up against plasteel…
But he carried her the few steps down the corridor to the narrow bunk. He had to duck to lower her into the tight berth, and when he crawled in beside her, the close confines under the slanted ceiling felt almost unbearably intimate, more so even than sharing the inner recesses of her body. In all the universe, they’d come together in this limited space, but beyond their little cocoon, she knew those vast, relentless forces whirled on without them.
This was their only time, a moment of connection and sanctuary before the sun rose and they got their power back. She’d never taken a lover just for herself, but she’d take Troy, here and now, never mind what happened next.
Chapter 8
He was falling for Nell Dearly.
Or maybe that was just the weak gravity. Didn’t matter. As Troy tucked himself into the tiny berth with her, all coherent thought left him. The silky caress of her skin against him, the hot tangle of their limbs in the darkness, the musky scent of her arousal—all the sensual overload arced through the careful modulation of his systems, rippling through his muscles and implants alike. He’d be a smoking, ruined shell of a shroud when she was done with him.
He couldn’t wait.
No, he would wait, as long as she wanted. He must hold onto enough of his Theta wiles and stamina to give her what she needed. How ironic that just as he was close—so close, skin close—to reclaiming control over his own mind and body and nanites, he was shaking with the urge to abandon it all, to give up everything he was to this guarded Earther girl.
All the insights and applications in his protocols turned to dust and blew away when she traced just the tips of her fingernails down his shoulders and around his ribs, igniting lightning shivers in every nerve ending. The thunder of his heartbeat through his body—especially downward—threatened to split the glued wounds, as if his blood itself, even drained of nanites, still wanted to flow with her.
What a mess.
In his distraction, when she bowed her body underneath his to roll him over, he let her wriggle on top. He didn’t even care when her knee accidentally brushed his swollen erection—he’d take any touch from her, any time.
And when she stretched out around him, bringing those dangerous knees up to both sides of his flanks, she was touching him everywhere. “Stay,” she murmured, lifting his hands above his head.
With a touch, she released the stasis cuffs that had bound his wrists. Somehow, that riddance seemed to unmoor him. She’d let him go… The lightning shivers became a cosmic storm, his senses swirling and lost. Only his straining erection pointed a way to finding himself again.
She took his aching flesh into her hand and gave him a velvety stroke. The pleasure that shot through him was more stunning than anything that had ever come from the end of a blaster rifle. He braced his hands against the low ceiling of the bunk to stop himself from grabbing her, from driving himself deep into her body and spending himself so quick he’d embarrass even the millisecond half-lives of decaying carbon isotopes.
With a hum that he felt all the way down in his deepest implants, she stroked him again, and then again, plumping his already stiffened flesh to an almost painful extreme. Had she somehow found a way to call his repressed nanites upward? If so, she was more devious than any hacker, more wicked than any Earther witch. And he thrilled at the sensation.
He couldn’t help but arch his hips off the bunk, and she had to duck to avoid bumping her head on the ceiling. Shamelessly, he took advantage of her lower stance to kiss her deep. The back-and-forthing of their tongues and breath wasn’t the swapping of technology or even the vying for seductive power. It was a sharing, pure and simple.
When she slipped her thick, wet folds around his shaft—not taking him in, just teasing—he groaned at the blissful agony. The consortium engineers had been pragmatic about keeping the pleasure/pain receptors intact in their shroud blanks as a training and obedience tool, but they’d never anticipated that their cynical shortcut would be so gloriously perverted to set their slaves free with the power of a passionate touch.
Nell keened out a moan that echoed through him on some primitive wavelength that made every muscle in his body tighten in anticipation. The rich scent of her arousal was like nothing this cold little moon had ever known. For the first time, he understood the prayers and curses of so many worlds. He would proselytize a new religion in her name, her body, the magnificence of her desire that could bring dead flesh to life. How very unrobotic of him.
When she angled the blunt head of his erection at the hot, silky opening of her body, he groaned out a deep, almost anguished breath, ready, so ready. And he groaned even louder when she hesitated. “Nell…”
“This isn’t right,” she said in a ragged voice. “We’re only doing this so you can have your nanites back. I don’t want to be like the people who used me when I was fighting to just survive.”
Framing her face in his hands, he levered her chin up to meet his steady gaze. “We’re doing this for us,” he said fiercely. “For our own reasons. Yes, for what we need, but also for what we want. And if we both want this, if we give pleasure while we take it, this isn’t wrong. This is what we’ve chosen.”
As her lashes fell to hide her clouded eyes, she tilted her face into the cradle of his palm. “But you know as well as I do that freedom is an illusion. No matter how far or fast we run, there are always strings holding us back.”
“But we can choose the ties that bind us,” he growled. “And I choose you.”
With a little cry he couldn’t decipher despite the universal translator that had been installed in him at the moment of his creation, she impaled herself on the pulsing apex of his erection. And it was as if everything he’d been looking for was right there.
With a seething breath, she sank down onto him, drawing the length and girth of his shaft into her body. All his awareness condensed to that throbbing point of connection.
And then she started to move.
Up and down, she stroked herself, and him, each moment of succulent friction ratcheting his tension higher, until his plasteel implants seemed to groan with him. She had him wound so tight he feared all his control, all the web of words and tricks he’d woven around them, would break away, leaving him untethered—and alone.
But of course he wasn’t alone. She was right here. He threaded his fingers up into her hair, drawing the garnet strands forward to flicker between them with each of her thrusts like undying flames. He skimmed his palms over the curves of her shoulders and over the swell of her biceps where she braced herself above him. She was stronger than she looked, not just because of his nanites but from all she’d experienced. With reverence and hunger, he cupped the soft, full pendants of her breasts, his thumbs skimming over the puckered peaks. The touch, light as it was, disrupted the thrusting of her hips and she lifted her hands to cup over his.
“I like that,” she said in a guttural tone. “And down here too.” She redirected their joined hands to the crux of their bodies.
The throbbing pulse of his swollen flesh was matched in the smaller nub of hers, and together they moaned as he found the rhythm she liked best.
Her hips rocking into his took on greater urgency, and he wished he had extra arms with extra hands to hold and touch her. Maybe some other extra body parts she might enjoy…
Body mod on the fly wasn’t in the cards at the moment, but unable to resist, he loosed his precious store of nanites from deep inside and sent them surging up his erection. Above him, Nell’s eyes flared wide—and he saw her shock and wonder in the faint silvery glow that was too bright to be the emergency lights or even moonlight.
She stared down at him. “Is that you?”
“They can’t quite sing or dance, but…”
He’d been with her long enough, was close enough now, to feel the vibration and resonance of her body. Not just her body, her soul. Levering himself half off the bunk, he kissed an ever tightening circle around her breast where her heartbeat pounded against his lips. She cried out his name as he closed his teeth gently over the stiff flesh of her nipple, sucking deep, at the same time massaging the little bead of her clitoris. He gave to her in all the ways he could, and when her body seized tight, drawing him deep, he lifted his kiss to hers and sent a last, wild rush of energy pulsing through her.
Throwing her head back, she cried out, her hips grinding down onto his. His shroud reflexes, only slightly slowed by the shock of her hidden muscles convulsing around him, let him slip his hand behind her skull before she knocked herself out in the close confines of the bunk.
Although when she collapsed onto his chest, he worried he’d been too late.
But he’d hold her until she regained her senses. It wasn’t long enough though, and then she exhaled loudly across his chest, nuzzling her cheek into his pec. “I think I took more than I gave, didn’t I?”
He buried his nose in the garnet streak of her hair, inhaling the dizzying perfume of sex and pixberries and an impression none of his databases could define but that was quintessentially her. Now she’d always be part of his permanent archive. “You give me hope. Which is worth more than diamonds.”
After a moment, she tilted her face up to his. “That’s…unbelievably poetical. And mostly I mean just unbelievable.”
He smiled. “But it’s true. And you’ve also now given me my first orgasm.”
Her eyes widened. “Your…first? But this is what a Theta is made to do, among other things.”
“I never had the chance before now. You were my first kiss too.”
She let out a sputtering breath. “You should’ve told me! I would’ve done something…more.”
“You”—he kissed her friction-reddened lips—“are enough, just as you are.”
Still, the furrow between her brows didn’t ease. “I don’t believe you orgasmed either.”
“Shroud blanks are cloned and sterile, so we don’t have the same sort of mating behavio
rs. Except when the imprinting protocol initiates. And then…” He let his smile turn wicked. “Then your pleasure becomes ours.”
She licked her lower lip. “So the only way for you to feel something is for me to feel it and reflect it back to you?”
“It’s not quite that simple, but essentially.”
Looking down, she traced one fingertip around the healing sealant on his chest that had started to wear away from all the hard work. “That doesn’t seem fair.”
He shrugged, bouncing her head on his shoulder. “Fair is as illusory as freedom. The consortium doesn’t even include the concepts in our baseline protocols. I only know the definitions because of the universal translator and my years on Earth.”
“Your makers would be surprised at what you’ve learned since they lost you.”
“They’ll be very surprised. When I return to destroy them.”
She angled her face up to his, her eyes widening in surprise. “Return?”
“I’ve come into possession of a viral code that will end the consortium’s command of the shrouds. I was in the process of organizing a surprise reunion when you came for me.”
When she shook her head, the tangled locks of her hair danced across his pecs. “That sounds…too dangerous.”
“Danger was always part of my code. Unfortunately for the consortium.” He bared his teeth. “But they are the ones who made me.”
She huffed out a disapproving breath. “You can’t go after the consortium by yourself any more than I could defy Jed.”
Arching one eyebrow, he drawled, “And where is Jedediah James now, eh?”
She clamped her hand over her mouth, stifling a laugh. “You are so bad.”
“No wonder we fit so well together.”
When she laid her cheek against him again, the renewed contact kindled something inside him. “But…maybe we’re both too coldblooded.”
“Maybe we’ve reason to be.”
She turned her head to kiss his chest. “Shall we see if it’s true? Maybe I can show you more than that.”
